The former CNCF executive director Dan Kohn passed away due to complications from colon cancer. His wife announced the news:
Dan Kohn has been committed to promoting cloud-native technology and actively participating in the open source community during his tenure as CNCF executive director. Dan has led the creation of conformance standards for Kubernetes and the Kubernetes Certified Service Provider Program, both of which were launched in 2017 and have received extensive support from many companies throughout the cloud industry. Dan's wife also stated that his proudest achievement is coordinating the developer community for the Cloud Native Foundation.
Dan served as the chief operating officer of the Linux Foundation and helped launch the Linux Foundation’s Core Infrastructure Initiative, which was created after the outbreak of Heartbleed to fund and support the Internet Free and open source software projects.
In addition, Dan, as the executive officer of a non-profit organization, has led the Linux Foundation's public health program and used open source software to help public health departments respond to COVID-19 and other epidemics.
Open Source China once interviewed Dan Kohn on cloud native and open source related topics at the KubeCon + CloudNativeCon China Conference in 2018: CNCF Executive Director: Less technical debt, allowing China to come first